Out of my head

In the spring of 1972, the Czech military subjected a group of volunteers to experimental doses of LSD. Among them was Jan Svankmajer - then a struggling artist. Thirty years on, the award-winning animator explains how the nightmarish experience coloured his latest work

I have always thought of the creative act as a kind of therapy. We can never truly be rid of those demons that start pursuing us sometime during childhood and plague us for the rest of our lives, but creative activity can at least partially keep them at bay and make their presence bearable. If art has any purpose at all, then it is surely to liberate us from external and internal constraints, from the demons around and within us.

But before art can have any genuine liberating effect on an audience, it must first liberate the artist. In this sense every authentic creative act must be a kind of "autotherapy". Artistic creativity is of course not the only path to liberation. Another is erotic love. The link between the creative act and the sexual act is well known: in my own experience the need to be creative has always been less acute during periods of increased sexual activity, and vice versa. There was a time when I thought that drugs might have a similar liberating effect. But my experiments in that direction quickly disabused me of any illusions I might have had.

In the spring of 1972, a group of young psychiatrists at the Stresovice military hospital in Prague appealed for volunteers to take part in a study of LSD. We still don't know whether these experiments were part of a deliberate military programme, or whether the young doctors just thought it would be an interesting thing to do. Anyway, I volunteered, along with my wife Eva and several friends from the surrealist group. It was a horrific experience, one which it took me many years to get over.

They gave us the LSD intravenously. Then we lay there on our beds, waiting for it to take effect. At first it was pleasant enough, as the drug slowly began to take control. The first phase was a kind of regression to infancy and a feeling of utter helplessness. Then there were stroboscope-like effects: when I raised my arm the movement would be broken up into a series of static images, like a time-lapse shot, with a different colour for each phase.

At this point I was still aware of my surroundings. On the bed next to me, someone was laughing interminably. Then they let us walk around the room. That's when I finally lost my last vestiges of sanity. I was seized by panic, terror and paranoia. I was convinced that the whole thing was a trap designed to make me lose my mind. I started lashing out at the doctors, accusing them of wanting to destroy me, certain they would never let me out. I rushed off down the corridors, desperate to get out. Nurses and orderlies tried to restrain me, and I lashed out at them, too. Eventually they had to give me another jab of something to get me off the trip.

They kept me there overnight, locked in a padded room with no door handle, and told Eva she could come back for me in the morning. By then the worst of it was over and I was much calmer. But for years afterwards, in certain situations, I would have sudden inexplicable attacks of anxiety. For example, I couldn't take the tram at night. The penetration of reality beyond the tram windows and the reflection of the tram interior in the glass made me feel physically sick and I had to get out and walk. This crossover of dual realities, one static (reflection in the window) and the other dynamic (streets flashing by outside the tram) produced in me the same feeling of reality disintegrating and the same distorted perception I had experienced with LSD.

A few days before this experiment, as part of the same study, we'd been made to inhale some "tomato" gas, as they called it, which, like LSD, also had toxic effects. While the others really seemed to be transported into some kind mystic state of bliss, I was again "rejected" by the drug. As I breathed in the gas I had an utterly "realistic" experience of drowning. Almost immediately I passed out and then, apparently, started screaming in terror - so violently that the entire hospital rushed to see what was happening.

I believe an important factor in how people react to any kind of psychotropic drug is their general mental state at the time. When I took part in these experiments I was suffering from severe depression. My relationship with Eva was falling apart - it looked as if we might split up. This had been causing me terrible distress and I'm sure that to some extent it explains why I responded so badly to the drugs.

Maybe my reaction wouldn't have been so extreme if I'd been in a better mental state. Of course I may be wrong. My view may be somewhat warped by the wounded vanity of a spurned lover. Whatever the reasons, the drug rejected me. (Carlos Castaneda describes similar cases, by the way, in The Teachings of Don Juan.)

Drugs may be a way to a kind of liberation, but only for non-creative people. This is because the creative act is an act of magic - the more so the more it draws on the imagination. It is a ritual we invoke to exorcise demons and enter into a state of absolute freedom and absolute communication. Artistic creativity is essentially shamanistic, and the shaman makes use of drugs to induce the "creative" state.

Perhaps drugs are no more than a preserved and concentrated form of imagination. But the imagination also has a predilection for cruelty - which is why drugs can sometimes make people cruel and, instead of showing them the way to absolute freedom, drive them into the clutches of yet more demons.

What have these experiences got to do with my art? Directly - nothing. But they reconfirm my belief that there is a subversive aspect to the imagination. How does this relate to my most recent film, Little Otik? I don't know. Maybe in the way the unhappy heroes of the story succumb to their desire to have a child as they might have succumbed to a drug. That desire then gives birth to the demon which destroys them. What at first looks like gratification and deliverance from their desire turns out to be a pernicious delusion.

But perhaps I was only reminded of my experience in the hospital because while I was shooting Little Otik I had occasion to go back there several times - not as a guinea pig for LSD but as an out-patient in the rheumatology department, where they applied electro-magnets to my aching knees. And that, possibly, is the most depressing part of the whole story.